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Creating Your Characters
by TaekwondoLegend Obviously you can't have a story without characters. Even in an emotional poem about human emotion, with the words full of emotion and the world lost in emotion (emotion doesn't look like a word anymore), there are characters. Characters can be simple as ideas, such as the love and happiness in that poem. But generally what comes to mind when I say "character" is, well, a human. But since characters can be ideas, do they always have to be human? Of course not. Your character can be whatever you want them to be; it's your story. Character Traits Regardless of exactly what your character is, they've got to have traits. Even a character that's simply an idea has traits - first of all, that's what some of them represent, right? Happiness represents being happy. Boom. Character trait. And then there's the poem's other idea character, love. Love - given I'm not talking about romantic love here, leaning more towards love between siblings or good friends - is an idea that has traits such as being painful yet at the same time the most beautiful thing in the world. Now let's talk about characters that aren't ideas. Characters that are creatures, whether they're humans, dragons, tigers, dinosaurs, whatever. How do you think of them? My characters just come to me - I'll suddenly get an image in my head of, say, a tall Korean man with hair as black as night. Rather than thinking of a personality for him right away, I let his personality form as I write the story, which often changes the story for the better. It may stray from the original outline, but it's even more awesome than before. My characters tend to take over and write the story themselves - there's a lovestory in one of my books that wasn't even supposed to happen in the first place. But the characters clearly wanted to be together, despite their past (she hated him when they were kids) and it just ended up making the plot better. (I sound insane but this is how writing is, my friend.) Backstories Your character has to have a past. If there's time, he/she has a past. If there isn't time in your story and your character is a being of some sort, that's different. But in most cases, a character has a backstory. Let's bring back our dark-haired friend from the previous section. I described his hair as being black as night. Why is that? This might hint that he is a dark character with a dark past. What happened? Let's answer some questions here. We know he's tall. What might that say about him? He's used to looking down at people, and this can take on a figurative as well as a literal meaning. Perhaps he comes from a wealthy family. With wealth comes power, and with power comes the potential to abuse it. So maybe the reason he's so dark is because his family abused their power and he's forced to live in their shadows. He's so secretive because he doesn't want people to know they're his family, because they've done some awful things. Perhaps his father or mother - or maybe both of them - is the antagonist, or maybe an older sibling takes that role, having killed the parents. See? There we go. Backstory. Boom. Done. A character's backstory is crucial to developing a plot, so make sure you think every character's past through. Creating Interesting Characters: Video A video from my YouTube channel about creating interesting characters, as can be inferred from the title. Signs of a Good Character: Video Another video from my YouTube channel, this time talking about how you know when you have a good character ("good" meaning quality, not good or evil).Category:Fiction Category:Characters Category:Novels Category:Short Stories